I'm a privacy pragmatist, writing about the intersection of law, technology, social media and our personal information. If you have story ideas or tips, e-mail me at khill@forbes.com. PGP key here.
These days, I'm a senior online editor at Forbes. I was previously an editor at Above the Law, a legal blog, relying on the legal knowledge gained from two years working for corporate law firm Covington & Burling -- a Cliff's Notes version of law school.
In the past, I've been found slaving away as an intern in midtown Manhattan at The Week Magazine, in Hong Kong at the International Herald Tribune, and in D.C. at the Washington Examiner. I also spent a few years traveling the world managing educational programs for international journalists for the National Press Foundation.
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The Reaction To 'Girls Around Me' Was Far More Disturbing Than The 'Creepy' App Itself

All men are creepy stalkers looking for new digital aids to help them catch and rape women.

All women are damsels-in-distress who have no idea how much danger they are exposing themselves to with every Foursquare check-in.

“You’re too public with your digital data, ladies,” may be the new “your skirt was too short and you had it coming.”

Those are my takeaways from the past week’s furor over “Girls Around Me,” a geolocation app created by Russian-based i-Free Innovations, that used public data from Foursquare and Facebook to create a map showing ladies in one’s immediate area. The app has been in the Apple iTunes store for months, but got widespread attention after a write-up in Cult of Mac on Friday that described it as “a tool for rapists and stalkers.” Cult’s John Brownlee fired up the app to display it for friends at a BBQ, pulling up a map of their Boston neighborhood dotted with the photos of “girls with publicly visible Facebook profiles who have checked into these locations recently using Foursquare.” The app’s creators tell me the app was downloaded over 70,000 times.

After seeing it, one of Brownlee’s friends “went pale,” apparently terrified, when told that many people don’t understand their privacy settings and so probably have no idea they’re making themselves so easily findable (and thus stalk-able and rape-able). After the alarming write-up, Foursquare revoked the app’s access to its API. Shortly thereafter, i-Free Innovations pulled the now-useless app from the iTunes store.

i-Free did itself no favors in its design of ‘Girls Around Me,’ consisting of Bond-style silhouettes of naked ladies dancing and posing provocatively, but I think the reaction to the app was overblown. For one, how do we know that the women who could be found on this map did not want to be visible in this way? A recent Pew study found that women are the savvier sex when it comes to privacy settings, visiting them and ramping them up at much higher rates than men. Those Bostonians who popped up on Brownlee’s map may want to be publicly broadcasting where they are. There are, after all, dating apps, such as Blendr, that do offer exactly that to both men and women. Sometimes we can be found because we want to be found.

Many of us have become comfortable putting ourselves out there publicly in the hopes of making connections with friends and with strangers, whether through Facebook, Twitter, or OKCupid. It’s only natural that this digital openness will transfer over to the ‘real world,’ and that we will start proactively projecting our digital selves to facilitate in-person interactions. (For example, KLM is now allowing passengers to link their digital identities to their seats on the plane so that people can choose seatmates accordingly.)

We increasingly live in a ‘creepy’ world, in which we can find and manipulate information in unforeseeable ways. These new information flows sometimes feel ‘creepy’ because they’re new, unfamiliar, and to some people, unexpected. In this case, I think the backlash is rife with overly-aggressive privacy protectionism. The women “exposed” by ‘Girls Around Me’ have chosen to be on Foursquare, and the company tells me that the app was only able to pull up a woman’s Facebook profile if she chose to link it to her Foursquare account. In rejecting and banishing the app, we’re choosing to ignore the publicity choices these women have made (assuming, as Brownlee, does, that they did not intend to be that public), in the name of keeping them safe. And we make the ugly assumption that men who might want to check out women in the area have nefarious intentions. If you extend this kind of thinking ‘offline,’ we would be calling on all women to wear burkas so potential rapists and stalkers don’t spot them on the streets and follow them home.

I’m sorry, my friends, but I think apps like ‘Girls Around Me’ are the future. Some of us Foursquare users and public Twitterers are choosing to give up our privacy — and how much to give up, depending on the settings we choose. We don’t fear making connections with strangers; we crave it. Companies like Apple are patenting technologies that allow our phones to broadcast our identities to those around us and alert us when we have things in common. This is inevitable, and we can’t and shouldn’t assume that all strangers are rapists and stalkers waiting to pounce. (And for those that are, we may not be far from a future in which the “digital identities” projected include the fact that this particular guy is on a sex offenders’ registry or that this particular lady has been described by past beaus as “stalkery.”)

“Since the app’s launch we’ve seen numerous positive comments from users who claimed that the app helped them to discover ‘hot spots’ – venues that are popular among girls or boys,” wrote the app’s creators in a statement emailed this weekend. “Since the apps launch til last Friday nobody ever raised a privacy concern because, again, it is clearly stated that Girls Around Me cannot show the user more data than social network already does.”

As Roger Kay notes, there are some people who “haven’t woken up to how vulnerable we are with all our information out there waving in the wind.” And Brownlee ended his piece by noting that though their app is “creepy,” the i-Free folks weren’t doing anything wrong and might even provide a benefit:

This is an app you should download to teach the people you care about that privacy issues are real, that social networks like Facebook and Foursquare expose you and the ones you love, and that if you do not know exactly how much you are sharing, you are as easily preyed upon as if you were naked. I can think of no better way to get a person to realize that they should understand their Facebook privacy settings then pulling out this app.

Yes, people, think about your privacy settings. They’re important. But critics, also remember that some of us have thought about our privacy settings, chosen accordingly, and don’t mind showing up on geo-mapping apps. We’re not all damsels-in-distress going pale at the thought of being seen in public places and digital spaces.

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Can’t you log into foursquare and see who’s nearby if they allow “everyone” to see them? What’s the difference? Ticketmaster will show where people are sitting in a concert if they’ve linked their facebook profile to their tickemaster account. I don’t see what the big deal is with apps like this. If anything, it will simply remind those that are more open than they should be to lock down their settings or shut off their accounts altogether.

You are so right, and there are so few people saying this. Congratulations on having the guts to stand up to “politically correct” paranoia. I guess one reason women share this information is that they’d rather hear “So how was Rome?” than “Do you come here often?” and perhaps they’d like to imagine he picked her out because he likes her favorite book too, rather than because of how much cleavage she’s wearing tonight.

Yes, it is information that’s already out there, and which they chose to put out there and make public. I choose not to do the same, but why should I want to prevent these girls from doing so?

I really don’t see the tie with this app and rapists/perverts- have people who make this claim never set foot outside? If a perv is targetting women, he doesn’t need an app to help him do it- he can just walk outside on a public sidewalk or into a bar and jee-whiz, there are females there! The fact is, the vast majority of men aren’t rapists, and those that are don’t need an app to tell them where to find victims. It’d make a good episode of CSI, but tha’ts about it. Now that I think about it, have any of the TV crime dramas made an episode about this yet? I’d be a little shocked if they hadn’t.

Furthermore, I read an obnoxious article that was opposed to the criticism of this app (we may have read the same article) because “You’re too public with your digital data, ladies,” may be the new “your skirt was too short and you had it coming.”

This is just silly. Firstly, maybe I don’t hang out in the right circles to hear it, but I’ve never actually heard a “blame the victim” person- religiously, I’m a pretty conservative Christian, so I would have thought that if the “blame the victim” mentality was a prevalent one, I would hear it- but I don’t. I’ve heard plenty of warnings to girls to dress modestly because of how their choices in clothing impact guys, but never once have I heard someone actually blame a rape or assault on a girl’s clothing and say “She had it coming”. Perhaps some girls hear a general command to dress modestly, find the message over-bearing and patriarichal and so interpret it as “blame the victim”?

Furthermore, even if such “blame the victim” thoughts are prevalent, warning girls to check their privacy settings isn’t equivalent to it. It is more akin to telling girls to carry some mace and learn self-defense; and these messages (in my opinion) empower rather than demean women.

I disagree slightly with your application of our knowledge that women are more privacy sensitive than men. While this is true, you implicitly jump to that fact into saying that all women take care of their online privacy, which is almost definitely not true. There will always be those who put stuff out there that they don’t realize is out there, and the education needs to continue.

Your suggestion that the fact a person “has been described by past beaus as ‘stalkery’” (allegations by ex’s) be linked to digital identities sounds very disturbing. There could be some bounds in which as you first suggest sex offender status (a criminal conviction) could be linked in this way, though the sort of profile this would (presumably mandatorily) be attached is a Facebook profile. Surely anyone should be able to at least control whether allegations or rumours appear by a personal profile.

As a clarification: I was first going to reply to van der Hoeven to say I agree (as I do) but would like to add the above point; “Your” refers to the author Ms. Hill. I decided not to post as a reply, and clicked on the comment link below the article, but this still came out as a reply. Looks like Forbes.com’s interface needs some work.

The whole point of the original article was that a lot of people do not have a good handle on their privacy settings and do not realize how that can easily lead to an unwanted outcome. So yes, you are absolutely right, some have a good handle on privacy settings and the impact of choosing to go public. Congratulations. As soon as this “some” turns into “pretty much everyone”, sure, bring on those apps, show them in the Google glasses, etc! Until then, can we please continue to educate people about what their mostly involuntary choices really mean and keep pressure on Facebook et al to make their settings more accessible and easier to understand?

Valid point. However, If the intention of the original article was to educate people about the importance of setting privacy standards he should not have brought any apps or companies who create apps into the discussion. What he has done here is used his right to freedom of speech to virtually slaughter the name of a company who did nothing more than create an app to promote information that is already available through these social networking sites. He could have for instance said he knew of an app (without divulging the actual name of the app) and his message would have come across just as clearly. By all means educate people on privacy concerns but dont take an innocent company down just to prove a point.